Monday, July 2, 2007

Getting credit for going green

...The Montreal Climate Exchange isn’t having the easiest of births.

...“In the absence of strict government regulations requiring carbon emissions limits, this will never become anything more than a pilot project,” says Matthew Bramley of the Ottawa-based Pembina Institute, an environmental think-tank. “If you look at the EU, it’s a thriving market: in 2005 the volume of trading there was over $8-billion (U.S.).

But the Chicago Climate Exchange, which isn’t government-enforced, the volume was only $2.8-million (U.S.). Exchanges only become commercial propositions when there’s a large enough volume.”Bramley likes the idea of an exchange in principle—it’s a key component to the Kyoto Protocol—but worries that without any government support, it will languish.

If Europe is anything to go by, there is a large potential for success in greenhouse gas emission trading. In May, the World Bank reported that the trade in carbon dioxide emissions grew in 2005 to $10-billion (U.S.), a 10-fold increase over 2004, with the EU accounting for 75 per cent of the market, although almost half of the total amount of emissions reductions came from the developing world. The biggest buyers of the 453.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide credits sold in 2005 were Japan, Britain and Italy. The biggest seller by far was China.